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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'When Maggie's vibrant young husband, father to a five-year-old daughter and an unborn son, dies tragically, Maggie is left widowed and due to give birth three months later to their second child. Then her beloved mother, backbone of the family, mother to three children, grandmother to two, dies suddenly of aggressive cancer. In two short years, Maggie's life has shattered. After a year, she gives up trying to juggle single motherhood and the demands of an academic career and returns with her children to the family farm in central western New South Wales to take stock and catch a breath. The farm becomes a redemptive, healing place for Maggie and her children as they battle the heat and drought that only the Australian landscape can offer. She throws herself into the horses, sheep, ducks and chickens and slowly, finally, realises she has found a new shape for herself. Written by a brilliant new talent, When It Rains is a meditation on grief and the vagaries of the human condition, and a stunning memoir about piecing back together a life, and moving forward, one step at a time.' (Publisher's description)

Works about this Work

Frameworks of Grief : Narrative as an Act of Healing in Contemporary MemoirBernadette Brennan,
2012single work criticism — Appears in:
TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses,Aprilvol.
16no.
12012;Abstract'In his recent review of Joan Didion's Blue Nights (2011), critic and writer Andrew Riemer admitted to feeling uneasy. While acknowledging that many readers would respond differently, he noted that reading about Didion's grief over the loss of her daughter made him feel 'like an intruder into very private sorrow'. Riemer questioned the ethics of writing about the death of a child for publication. Asserting that grief was essentially mute, he argued that Didion should have stayed silent in the face of her extraordinary losses. At a time when memoirs about bereavement and loss are enjoying unprecedented popularity, Riemer's suggestions raise important issues for writers and readers of memoir. In this article I offer close readings of two recent memoirs of bereavement, Virginia Lloyd's The Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement (2008a) and Maggie MacKellar's When it Rains (2010), in order to explore some of the narrative strategies at work and to suggest that it is the very act of writing, specifically of crafting and shaping a narrative for publication, that enacts healing. ' (Author's abstract)

'In Law and Literature, a subject offered to the University of Melbourne’s final-year law students, they study Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man and Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. In both books the law fails. Or as Gary Cazalet, who got the subject up and running, says of Hooper’s book: ‘It is an indictment of our legal system and it isn’t.’ I’d put it another way. In both books the victims’ families find, in law, neither solace nor justice. Justice, that is, the way we laypeople like to imagine it: morally purifying, thunderously absolute, a revelation, a release—justice of the kind that law can rarely give us.' (Author's introduction)

The Invisible GiftCatherine Keenan,
2010single work column — Appears in:
Australian Author,Decembervol.
42no.
32010;(p. 12-15)Abstract'Mentoring involves teaching but requires something more strange and intimate than just passing on knowledge. Catherine Keenan talks to writers about the people who lifted them up when they were young'. (p12)

The Invisible GiftCatherine Keenan,
2010single work column — Appears in:
Australian Author,Decembervol.
42no.
32010;(p. 12-15)Abstract'Mentoring involves teaching but requires something more strange and intimate than just passing on knowledge. Catherine Keenan talks to writers about the people who lifted them up when they were young'. (p12)

Frameworks of Grief : Narrative as an Act of Healing in Contemporary MemoirBernadette Brennan,
2012single work criticism — Appears in:
TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses,Aprilvol.
16no.
12012;Abstract'In his recent review of Joan Didion's Blue Nights (2011), critic and writer Andrew Riemer admitted to feeling uneasy. While acknowledging that many readers would respond differently, he noted that reading about Didion's grief over the loss of her daughter made him feel 'like an intruder into very private sorrow'. Riemer questioned the ethics of writing about the death of a child for publication. Asserting that grief was essentially mute, he argued that Didion should have stayed silent in the face of her extraordinary losses. At a time when memoirs about bereavement and loss are enjoying unprecedented popularity, Riemer's suggestions raise important issues for writers and readers of memoir. In this article I offer close readings of two recent memoirs of bereavement, Virginia Lloyd's The Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement (2008a) and Maggie MacKellar's When it Rains (2010), in order to explore some of the narrative strategies at work and to suggest that it is the very act of writing, specifically of crafting and shaping a narrative for publication, that enacts healing. ' (Author's abstract)

'In Law and Literature, a subject offered to the University of Melbourne’s final-year law students, they study Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man and Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. In both books the law fails. Or as Gary Cazalet, who got the subject up and running, says of Hooper’s book: ‘It is an indictment of our legal system and it isn’t.’ I’d put it another way. In both books the victims’ families find, in law, neither solace nor justice. Justice, that is, the way we laypeople like to imagine it: morally purifying, thunderously absolute, a revelation, a release—justice of the kind that law can rarely give us.' (Author's introduction)